Tekijät

• Ministry of Social Affairs and Health

Asiasanat

addiction, debts, expenditure, family members, friends, gambling, gaming machines, guilt, lotteries

Sisällön kuvaus

The survey charted Finnish gambling habits. The term gambling is used here as an umbrella term for lotteries, slot machines, betting, bookmaking, the pools, roulette wheels, and card and dice tables. The respondents were asked to indicate the different types of gambling, betting, and games of chance they had played during the past year. They were also asked how often they usually engaged in the mentioned gambling activities, and whether they usually gambled through a bookmaker or an agent, or on the Internet. If the respondent engaged in gambling activities more often than twice a month, he/she was asked to estimate the average weekly sum spent in gambling, and the largest sum spent during one day.

One topic pertained to whether any of respondents' relatives or peers had had a gambling problem. The respondents were also asked whether they returned another day to try to win back the money they had lost, whether they ever gambled more than they intended to, whether they had ever claimed to be winning while gambling, even though they were actually losing money, and whether people criticised their gambling or told them they had a gambling problem.

Some questions explored whether the respondents ever felt guilty while gambling, whether they had wanted to stop betting money or gambling but could not do it, and whether they had ever hidden their gambling from their family members. The respondents were also asked whether they had ever argued with people they live with over how they handled money and whether those arguments had ever centered on their gambling.

Other topics included whether the respondents had ever borrowed from someone and not paid them back as a result of their gambling, whether they had ever lost time from work or school due to betting or gambling, and whether they had borrowed or acquired money to gamble or to pay gambling debts. Finally, the respondents' opinions were probed on whether they themselves gambled too much, whether problem gambling was a serious problem in Finland, and whether gambling problems had increased, stayed the same, or decreased.

Background variables included respondent's gender, age, region of residence, occupation, monthly income, household size, and municipality size.